“It doesn’t surprise me that people use the show to break up with someone,” on-and-off host Chris Jagger told the Los Angeles Times. 100 Days of Summer followed wealthy Chicago socialites as they navigated a summer in the city. It seemed promising, and there were sprinklings of drama that reality TV fans crave, but ultimately, fans agreed there wasn’t anything particularly memorable about any of the cast members and the show only stuck around for one season in 2014. Queer Eye For The Straight Guy was a landmark series and helped kick off a new direction for Bravo in the early 2000s. The network execs were eager to continue the show’s success, which prompted the forgotten spinoff, Queer Eye For The Straight Girl.
Trashy Reality Shows From The Early 2000s That You Totally Forgot About
But TLC wasn’t content having just a single show about a polygamist family on their network. My Five Wives documented the lives ofBrady Frederick Williams; his wives, Paulie, Robyn, Rosemary, Nonie, and Rhoda; and their 25 children. TLC aired 21 episodes of the largely-forgotten My Five Wives from 2013 to 2014.
Besides Octomom, Kate was the one reality star of the time known for having a lot of children. This show trapped a bunch of B-list celebrities together in the wild, sat back, and watched them try to survive. Season 1 aired in 2003 and featured the likes of Cris Judd and Caitlyn Jenner, while season 2 aired in 2009 and gifted us some prime Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt content. Two self-proclaimed “players” battle it out for access to a VIP room to party with friends. They compete in a series of challenges to pick up women at different nightclubs and they’re judged by—get this—four “expert” pick up artists. Some throwback Bravo shows have a cult following, like Ladies of Londonor Gallery Girls,but others have fallen through the cracks of time, eclipsed by more popular franchises as the network continuously evolves.
Nowadays, Tila Tequila fires off on twitter with some rather unpleasant thoughts. Keeping with the theme of putting parents into the dating lives of their children, MTV gave us “Parental Control” from 2005 to 2010. In this seven-season series, parents choose potential matches for their son or daughter in hopes that going on a date with any of their selections will lure their child away from their current significant other.
Now the “Bachelor” stars are also chosen out of the pool rejects from “The Bachelorette.” This endless circle is one thing that makes the show so successful since they use people who the audience already loves. Each episode helped one man or woman find a date with eligible contestants. The potential partners were hidden out of sight behind a board while the eligible bachelor or bachelorette made decisions based solely on their answers and voices. Regardless of the decade, dating shows are always interesting when presented in some type of preposterous format. So the decade’s new take on “reality” was destined to result in some of the best TV shows of the 2000s. Don’t get it twisted, while some of these TV shows were legitimately good, others were so bad that they managed to be good.
Then, thanks to shows like The Real World, Survivor, and Big Brother, non-scripted television began to take over the landscape for quite a while. Arguably at its height during the 2000s, during that decade most TV networks worked hard to create the next “reality” show sensation. Though some thought “Boy Meets Boy” exploited harmful stereotypes, others felt it demonstrated the fact that gay and straight men can co-exist as friends.
Since MTV stands for Music Television, it makes sense that one of the oldest and most popular shows on the network isMTV Unplugged—a show that let’s artists perform acoustic versions of their songs for an audience. Many musicians, from Paul McCartney to Mariah Carey, have appeared on the show. For anyone clunking around town in a banged up car,Pimp My Ridewas the ultimate goal. During each episode, a team of car experts, including mechanics and customizers, came together to give one lucky person the car of their dreams. Plain Janepremiered on the CW, but after not getting renewed, it made its way over to MTV for season 2.
‘Date My Mom’
The show joined the VH1 programming schedule for its last four seasons, with the WB network holding the first two seasons. The show eventually lost viewership as the stars used for the show became more obscure. This 2003 series aimed to capitalize Link on the popularity of the movie Blue Crush, following the lives of competitive surfers angling to win a spot on the professional circuit. When Tila Tequila’s show first premiered on MTV, the concept pushed the boundaries of cable television.
Chains of Love physically chained contestants together and filmed around the clock. Lorenzo Lamas pointing out people’s flaws with a laser pointer on Are You Hot? Rachel Hunter partaking in this nonsense as a woman herself? We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we love.
When they all move into the same house, they’re tasked with figuring out who matches with who. People like Tila Tequila, New York, Bret Michaels, and Flavor Flav all took shots at finding love on TV. Unlike many of the other dating show producers, the minds behind these MTV hits didn’t seem to care that everything was so obviously staged. They aired “Parental Control,” “Next,” “Date My Mom,” and “The X Effect,” all while keeping up with 2001’s “ElimiDate” which ran for five years. An episode of MTV’s “Parental Control” usually consisted of bickering between the parents and the disliked significant other.
Despite the producers’ promise that it wasn’t scripted, some of the 110 CBS affiliates that ran the show put it on at 2 a.m. Averaging three million viewers a night, Studs was a brief phenomenon when it was syndicated on Fox affiliates. Two male contestants went on one-on-one dates with each of the three female contestants before taping. On the show, each man would try to guess which female contestant said one of the three answers to host Mark DeCarlo’s questions about the date. In the end, if the men could guess which woman chose him as the “stud” over the other, they won another date.
The idea behind Fear on MTV was that contestants had to perform dares at night in an allegedly haunted location. If you ever watched the show at night, alone, then you understand how legitimately scary it was, even for a reality show. Where would we be if we had never met Stephen Colletii, Kristin Cavallari, and Lauren Conrad thanks to Laguna Beach? It was a show that started an empire on MTV and first followed a group of wealthy teens in California before it watched them grow up a bit and develop new drama each season. The show followed Ozzy Osbourne and his family during their everyday life at home and through various business and music ventures.